Crimea Repels Massive Cyberattack On E-Government Systems - Minister

SIMFEROPOL (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 14th August, 2019) Crimean authorities have repelled a massive SYN-flood cyberattack on the servers of their digital portal, Crimea's Minister of Internal politics, Information and Communications Sergei Zyryanov said on Wednesday.

"There were attempts to create conditions that would preclude users from accessing the information portal. The consequences of the cyberattack were minimized thanks to the coordinated efforts of a professional team. For a short time, users experienced access difficulties, namely longer than usual wait times, to the e-government resources. At the moment, all access difficulties have been alleviated," Zyryanov said as quoted by the ministry's press service.

Hackers launched a so-called distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS), sending to Crimea's e-government server a total of 16.

5 billion SYN requests from 1.5 million different IP addresses registered in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, France, South Korea, Japan and other countries, the press service added.

According to Zyryanov, the cyberattack lasted for one day and was aimed at blocking the e-desk of Crimea's head Sergei Aksyonov, the portal and emails of the Crimean government and several other internet resources.

Crimea rejoined Russia after nearly 96 percent of its voters supported the move through a referendum held in March 2014. Ukraine, as well as the majority of Western countries, have not recognized the referendum results. Russian authorities have repeatedly claimed that the Crimean residents decided to rejoin Russia through a democratic procedure and that the referendum was conducted in compliance with international law.